Nordheim loses fight as Railroad Commission OKs oil field landfill

AUSTIN — The tiny town of Nordheim, population 307, lost a key battle in a three-year fight against the oil industry Tuesday when the Texas Railroad Commission approved the permit for an oil field landfill on its doorstep.

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The three-member commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, defied public opposition in granting a permit for the landfill near the city limits of Nordheim in DeWitt County, one of the busiest parts of the Eagle Ford Shale oil field.

“Does your client understand the social license to operate they have asked for here?” Commissioner Ryan Sitton asked the attorney for the company that wants to build and operate the site. “I’ll be candid. I don’t like the site.”

The landfill would accept oil-based mud, soil contaminated by oil spills and drill cuttings, as well as broken bits of rock and dirt that get drilled through on the way to finding oil and gas.

Whether he liked it or not, Sitton said that didn’t matter because the site met the state’s technical requirements.

“Don’t screw this up,” he warned San Antonio-based Pyote Reclamation Systems, which hopes to build the waste facility.

Residents in yellow T-shirts that read “Citizens against Pyote Reclamation” vowed to keep fighting, and talked strategy in the hallway as soon as the meeting ended. Most of them woke when it still was dark out so they could meet up for the two-plus-hour caravan ride to Austin as the sun rose.

“We’ll be back. You can’t get rid of a bunch of old Germans that easily,” said Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, a nun with the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, who grew up in nearby Cuero and has been an environmental advocate for residents across the region.

Nordheim, population 307, had put up a fight few others communities have managed to wage, with technical arguments that questioned site engineering.

The small town’s residents have held up the approval process for three years with their lobbying, letters and public testimony.

They say the site is potentially hazardous, is too close to their city and just a half-mile from their school, which has about 170 students. They also have raised questions about whether a big rain would send water from the site, which would be on a high point called Pilot’s Nob, into creeks and onto neighboring properties, and argued that the soil on site couldn’t be used to build berms that would hold water during a flood.

Pyote Reclamation’s George Wommack said the company took the concerns of residents seriously and designed a safe landfill.

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“It’s all about best practices. We’ve designed the best facility in South Texas,” Wommack said.

He would like to start construction to start in 2017.

“We have two projects in the Permian Basin we’re focused on right now,” Wommack said.

Nordheim residents had expected the commissioners would not vote their way.

“We plan to go further,” said Lyn Janssen, who lives on Hohn Road, where the facility would be built.

The attorney for Nordheim residents, Marisa Perales, said they plan to file a motion for rehearing before the commission, and failing that, could consider going to district court in Travis County.

They could also oppose an air permit for the site at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The fight has been waged since residents first heard about the project three years ago.

They wrote nearly 200 protest letters. They founded a group called Concerned About Pollution, the only one of its kind in the 400-mile oil field, and hired attorneys, geologists and chemical engineers to help them fight the application process in Austin.

They have taken charter buses and showed up by the dozens at Railroad Commission hearings with T-shirts and signs protesting the project. At one hearing, nearly all of the Nordheim School senior class, 11 students out of 14, showed up, too.

After residents raised questions about whether the site could handle catastrophic floods, the design was changed so the stormwater ponds on site could handle hurricane-level amounts of rain, about 10.1 inches of rainfall in 24 hours.

In the past few months, residents also questioned the safety of a pipeline that crosses the site. They pointed out in a December hearing before an administrative judge that the pipeline company never had been notified about the project.

But the pipeline company earlier this year sent a letter to the agency, saying it had no issues with the landfill.

Many of the residents’ biggest safety concerns — the chance for increased truck traffic on a narrow road, the ability of its volunteer fire department to respond to a fire at an oil field landfill and the proximity of the site to Nordheim’s only K-12 school — are things the state agency has said are beyond its purview.

Alan Buchhorn, whose family has owned a farm near the proposed landfill for about 130 years, said he wasn’t surprised by Tuesday’s vote.

“It just seems like there’s such a narrow margin they look at, and they don’t consider health issues or the community around the site,” Buchhorn said. “There’s such a lack of concern for people. There’s only concern about getting it approved.”

State Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, attended Tuesday’s hearing to support residents and oppose the site.

She said she was proud of Nordheim for putting up a technically complex battle against the permit. She told commissioners she understood they couldn’t consider the ramifications of permits — an issue she said should be tackled in the next legislative session while the agency is under Sunset Review, the regular assessment of a state agency.

“It’s going to cause this community some real problems,” Morrison said.

Railroad Commissioner Sitton visited Nordheim late last year, spending about a half-day visiting with residents and seeing the site where the landfill would be located.

“He wanted to see the community himself to understand it,” Morrison said. “Also, he was saying, ‘This is our role. This is what we do.’”

The problem of waste in the Eagle Ford and where to put it has been a difficult one for communities, several of which have said they are worried they will end up used as a dumping ground. Drilling in the Eagle Ford generates a lot of water and solid waste that must go somewhere, but no one wants it disposed of next to them.

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Environmental engineers for Pyote said the land is close to ideal for this sort of facility — it’s covered in a thick layer of clay, is not in an aquifer recharge area and has no wetlands. Under the terms of the permit, it would not be allowed to impact groundwater or surface water — all water would be contained on-site.

Residents disagree and say soil tests weren’t done properly. But if it weren’t for the protests, the facility long ago would have sailed through an administrative approval process with the Railroad Commission staff.

Now residents hope the market conditions — generally lousy in the oil and gas business — might work in their favor.

“They’re not drilling,” said Nordheim Mayor Kathy Payne. “I don’t see how they can be profitable. None of the sites are making money right now.”

Another facility opened in nearby Cuero off of U.S. 183 — one that recycles oil field material instead of landfilling it in deep, permanent pits. Several Nordheim residents and local officials have toured that facility, and say they hope that all the oil field material goes there instead.